Irish high street bank AIB has acknowledged a glitch in its online banking service following a report by The Irish Independent.
The issue was initially discovered by a Dublin businessman who, while attempting to log in with new user credentials, inadvertently accessed another user’s account information. After trying to report the error to the bank and being placed on hold for over 45 minutes, he opted to reach out to the newspaper instead.
“My concern is that this could be exploited by disgruntled employees in small businesses to manipulate company accounts,” the businessman stated. “It would be incredibly easy to alter payment setups. Even if that didn’t occur, it’s unacceptable for someone to gain access to company accounts without the correct login.”
AIB attributed the glitch to an IT update conducted the previous weekend, affecting a limited number of business customers who had exited the business banking desktop application without properly signing out. The bank confirmed that the issue has been resolved and that no personal customers were impacted.
This incident highlights ongoing issues in the Irish banking sector, as AIB has experienced two outages in its online banking app this year and faced difficulties processing payments for tracker mortgage customers. Additionally, Bank of Ireland attracted significant attention when a bug allowed customers without funds to withdraw cash, leading to long queues at ATMs nationwide in a misguided attempt to access ‘free money’.